Leaving the Oasis (1880s): Art, History and Details

Leaving the Oasis (1880s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Jean-Léon Gérôme (French, 1824–1904).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Leaving the Oasis repeats several themes in Gérôme's art—camel caravans, oases, and expansive desert landscapes. As an academic realist, Gérôme painted everyday scenes in a meticulous and polished style. Here he carefully rendered the unique forms of the figures' dress and the camels' physical features, as well as the colors of the changing sky and the violet shadows cast by the airborne dogs and the legs of the camels. Although the picture's smoothness and detail suggest a photographic image, Gérôme actually composed his paintings in the studio, basing them on memories and sketches from his visits to the Near East. Following his first trip to Egypt in 1856, he developed into a major figure among 19th-century "Orientalists"—artists who specialized in representing Near Eastern life, culture, and landscapes.

Object facts

• Title: Leaving the Oasis
• Date: 1880s
• Creator attribution: Jean-Léon Gérôme (French, 1824–1904)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on wood panel
• Dimensions: Framed: 67.3 x 98.4 x 9.5 cm (26 1/2 x 38 3/4 x 3 3/4 in.); Unframed: 50 x 81.2 cm (19 11/16 x 31 15/16 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1977.126

Collection credit

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Noah L. Butkin

Further reading listed by the museum

• Argencourt, Louise d', and Roger Diederen. Catalogue of Paintings. Pt. 4. European Paintings of the 19th Century. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1974.
• Ackerman, Gerald M. Jean-Léon Gérôme: monographie révisée, catalogue raisonné mis à jour. Courbevoie: ACR, 2000.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.